Background
Valiantine was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
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George Valiantine
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He worked as a manufacturer before he discovered mediumship. He gave séances in America and Europe. Valiantine predicted in the 1920s that aliens would visit earth.
He also claimed contact with spirit guides known as Hawk Chief and Kokum.
Researcher Melvin Harris has written that Bradley was naïve and easily duped. However, Bradley later admitted he caught Valiantine cheating.
In 1931, Bradley wrote a book that exposed Valiantine as a fraud. According to a report by the Society for Psychical Research Valiantine was "repeatedly exposed in faking the physical phenomena at his seances".
Voices were heard in the séances of Valiantine and he always used a trumpet but denied that he had spoken through lieutenant
The psychical researcher Ernest Palmer had investigated the trumpet after a séance and discovered "a good deal of moisture" inside the mouth piece, which indicated that it been spoken into by an ordinary human and not a spirit. Valiantine entered for the Scientific American prize of $2,500, to be awarded to any medium producing spiritualist phenomenon under test conditions. In the test Valiantine produced movement of a trumpet in the dark séance room, however, an electrical connection had been rigged to his chair which was connected to a light in an adjoining room which revealed that all the trumpet activity coincided with when he left his chairman
Valiantine had not known his chair was wired.
The psychical researcher Harry Price described the test séance:
Valiantine did not collect the award as he had cheated and was pronounced a fraud by the Scientific American committee. In 1925, Harry Price investigated the "direct voice" mediumship of Valiantine in London.
In the séance Valiantine claimed to have contacted the "spirit" of the composer Luigi Arditi who spoke Italian. Price wrote down every word that was attributed to Arditi and they were found to be word-for-word matches in an Italian phrase-book
In 1931 Valiantine was exposed as a fraud in the séance room as he produced fraudulent "spirit" fingerprints in wax.
The "spirit" thumbprint that Valiantine claimed belonged to Arthur Conan Doyle was revealed to be the print of his big toe on his right foot. lieutenant was also revealed that Valiantine made some of the prints with his elbow.
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The British spiritualist author Herbert Dennis Bradley defended Valiantine as a genuine medium and wrote two books about his mediumship.
